About Us
Our Mission:
Expanding Access to Effective Trauma Recovery
Our mission is to make effective trauma recovery more accessible worldwide. We are committed to equipping both licensed mental health professionals and individuals, including paraprofessionals, clergy, peers, families, and trauma survivors themselves, with structured, practical tools to support recovery.
We deeply value the role of trained clinicians and encourage collaboration with professionals familiar with the Instinctual Trauma Response® (ITR) model whenever possible. At the same time, we recognize real-world barriers such as limited provider availability, long waitlists, and financial or geographic constraints that can delay care.
To help bridge this gap, we are developing complementary solutions designed to extend access, not replace clinical care. Our web-based platform integrates structured ITR protocols with guided, AI-assisted support, allowing individuals to engage in aspects of their recovery independently when appropriate, or alongside professional care to reinforce progress between sessions.
For individuals who require or prefer in-person support, clinicians remain essential. In these cases, guided between-session work may further enhance treatment outcomes.
We advocate for a continuum of care that expands access across care teams and empowers individuals while respecting professional standards and clinical judgment.
As Dr. Louis Tinnin noted, “Of all the mental health issues, those related to trauma are the most treatable.”
Louis Tinnin, MD
Co-Founder of ITR®
Dr. Tinnin (1932-2014) had a successful 50-year career as a psychiatrist. He served as the founder of two outpatient trauma clinics: Trauma Recovery Institute (1996-2006) and Intensive Trauma Therapy (2006-2017). He and his wife, Linda Gantt, developed Instinctual Trauma Response® from early clinical trials at Chestnut Ridge Hospital at West Virginia University (Morgantown, West Virginia) and the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Administration Medical Center (Clarksburg, West Virginia). He and Dr. Gantt worked tirelessly together to help people fully recover from trauma symptoms to live a healthy and productive life.
Dr. J. Eric Gentry said “Dr. Tinnin turned Pierre Janet’s work of the 1880’s into a comprehensive treatment model for effectively treating trauma and dissociation.”
Bessel van der Kolk described Dr. Tinnin at a conference as ‘the greatest trauma mind of the 20th Century.’
We miss him greatly and honor Dr. Gantt for continuing their commission to make trauma recovery accessible worldwide.
In the 1970s, Dr. Tinnin had a private practice in psychiatry in Laurel, Maryland. He was active in the politics of mental health and instrumental in getting the state of Maryland to pass a law requiring that general hospitals have psychiatric units at a time when even the most prestigious hospital in the state was little more than a warehouse for seriously disturbed psychiatric patients.
After moving to West Virginia in 1979, Dr. Tinnin served as the medical director of a community mental health center. In 1984, he joined the faculty of the Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at West Virginia University, serving as associate professor and professor. He began learning more about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an area that interested few people at the time.
Some cases that Dr. Tinnin saw in medical school stayed with him his entire life. He questioned the received wisdom of older doctors who did not comprehend how invasive medical procedures without anesthesia for babies could be traumatic. These doctors assumed the child’s nervous system was too immature to feel pain and, even if the child did feel it, he or she would not remember it. His clinical observations impelled Dr. Tinnin to work out procedures for dealing with early memories that were nonverbal but resulted in long-lasting and disturbing symptoms.
In 1992, Dr. Tinnin developed a Fellowship in Psychotraumatology in conjunction with WVU and the VA Medical Center. It was then that he began doing research on how to process traumatic events without reliving them including those in infancy and childhood.
After retiring from WVU in 1996 with the rank of professor emeritus, Dr. Tinnin established his own clinics, the Trauma Recovery Institute (TRI) (1996-2006) and Intensive Trauma Therapy (ITT) (2006-present), where he refined his ideas about effective, simple, and brief trauma treatment.
Dr. Tinnin wrote a number of professional papers and made over 200 national and international presentations. He and Linda authored The Instinctual Trauma Response and Dual Brain Dynamics (2013). Although Dr. Tinnin knew his health was failing, he continued to work on several projects until two weeks before his death.
Dr. Tinnin was a strong supporter of the mental health freedom and recovery movements. He devoted his life to collaborating with other professionals and spreading the good news that trauma can be easily and effectively resolved and that it doesn't take years to do it.
LINDA GANTT PhD, ATR-BC
Art Therapist and Co-Founder of ITR®
Linda Gantt is dedicated to the Mental Health Emancipation and Recovery movement. She strives to keep her contributions to trauma recovery and art therapy up to date with the ever-changing neuroscience and the challenging mental health field. Dr. Gantt's Formal Elements Art Therapy Scale (FEATS) is a powerful art-based assessment used by many mental health professionals and is studied at graduate art therapy programs. The Instinctual Trauma Response protocol is quickly being adopted by many agencies and programs that help people recover from trauma. She has not stopped working hard to continue the work she started with her late husband and psychiatrist Dr. Louis Tinnin, over 45 years ago.
Dr. Linda Gantt is the co-owner of the ITR Training Institute LLC. She recently closed her Intensive Trauma Recovery intensive clinic to focus on getting the ITR protocol out to as many practitioners as possible to exponentially help heal more trauma survivors.
She is a board-certified art therapist (ATR-BC) with the Art Therapy Credentials Board. Her contributions to her profession are well known among art therapists, having served as president and editor of the inaugural issue of the journal of the American Art Therapy Association, and as the chair of the National Coalition of Art Therapies Associations. She is also a leading art therapy author. She, along with Carmello Tabone, developed the internationally recognized Formal Elements Art Therapy Scale (FEATS).
Dr. Gantt has taught in a number of graduate art therapy programs including the George Washington University, Vermont College, Notre Dame de Namur, and Florida State University.
Dr. Gantt worked for 7 years in her first art therapy position on the psychiatric and detoxification units at Prince George’s General Hospital, Cheverly, Maryland. During that time in the mid-1970s, the hospital staff did no routine screening for psychological traumas.
The conventional wisdom was that such things were better left alone. But the art therapy program Dr. Gantt conducted provided patients a means of showing their subjective experiences when they had no words for them.
With the benefit of hindsight, Dr. Gantt can look back and see that a number of people who were hospitalized repeatedly were actually trauma survivors. Over her 45-year career, Dr. Gantt watched the field of traumatology grow and develop in its theories and research.
As she and Dr. Tinnin developed their Instinctual Trauma Response® theoretical model, Dr. Gantt contributed her expertise in the nonverbal techniques of art therapy to create Graphic Narrative®. She demonstrated that these techniques--along with ”finishing the story”--have the ability to not just manage trauma symptoms but to eliminate many of them for good. This also frees any dissociative parts to engage in Externalized Dialogue® and be relieved of their burdens, and to be helpful in the person’s present-day life.
Dr. Gantt is committed to spreading the word about ITR with the professional training programs she has developed, her writings, and the ITR® web app, now being developed with the guidance of AI. She will never stop working to give trauma survivors access to full trauma recovery with ITR in whatever way she can.
Mary Carlson, ITR-CTRS
Co-Owner and Chief Executive Officer
Mary Carlson is a 3rd generation filmmaker and worked in the movie business for decades before she was introduced to Drs. Louis Tinnin and Linda Gantt and their trauma recovery approach; Instinctual Trauma Response® (ITR).
When Mary heard how ITR was administered, she connected right away with the idea of storyboarding the traumatic event with a voiceover narration and then directed journaling to literally counsel yourself. She started filming Drs. Tinnin and Gantt along with ITR clinicians and clients. They passionately spoke of the immediate and long-lasting healing power of ITR. She soon took on the mission to help Dr. Lou and Linda get the word out.
When Dr. Lou suggested anyone trained properly could do ITR, she suggested opening up the training to include anyone who wanted to learn.
Soon first responders on peer support teams, other non-licensed mental health professionals and foster parents registered and learned how to implement ITR in their programs.
"We will continue to train clinicians who want to heal trauma but most are overwhelmed and not taking clients. We are filling the gap, like they did in the medical field, and are training parapractioners like coaches, chaplains, foster parents, educators and first responders. Many lay people want to do what they can to assist in the mental health crisis we have going on worldwide.
Trauma affects everyone in some way. Dr. Tinnin would say traumatic stress symptoms are probably 95% of why someone sees a professional for help. People need to know trauma is an injury and not a life sentence. ITR can help them."
Dr. Tinnin also said there is no reason in the world why anyone should suffer from even a minimal trauma symptom. In our work, we see it is easy to treat and it doesn't take long to do it."
Now ITR is being developed to work with AI guidance to assist practitioners and survivors alike, making ITR more accessible worldwide.
See Mary's Wall of PhotosDanni Davis, MSW, LCSW-C, CCSOTS, ITR Certified® Traumatologist
Training Director of ITR®
clinician and educator with over three decades of expertise in trauma
recovery and systemic wellness. A graduate of West Virginia
University’s Master of Social Work program, Danni serves as ITR's Training Director and as a faculty member in the School of Human Services, Counseling, and Social Work at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC).
Her extensive public service includes a 23-year tenure with the Baltimore County Department of Social Services, where she served as Program Coordinator and clinical evaluator for the Treatment Program for Youth with Sexual Behavior Problems. A veteran expert witness for the Baltimore County Courts, Danni remains committed to expanding access to trauma-effective therapies through professional consultation, program development, and direct clinical service.
Yves Hughes, MBATM, MSDS
Chief IT Product Officer
Yves concentrates his efforts to make sure our tools are always cutting-edge, user-focused and accessible with the vision to bring healing to the masses. Winning many international hack-a-thons with companies like Meta, Google and Coinbase, Yves is an expert at AI and developing innovative platforms to make it accessible.
Yves and his wife Khalila, a UX designer, were foster parents to a sibling group of four and have since adopted. Understanding trauma and the need for access to therapy motivates him to keep innovating.
Yves has a BFA in Multimedia & Web Design from the Illinois Institute of Art and an MBA in Technology Management from the University of Phoenix and an MS in Data Science and Machine Learning from Southern Methodist University.
Elisabeth Holt McCarthy, M.S., ITR-CTRS
Research Director of ITR
Elisabeth is a clinical researcher with a multidisciplinary background in biomechanics, neuroscience, and psychology. She holds an M.S. in Exercise Science from the University of South Carolina. Since 2017, she has contributed on projects including neuromuscular control, mild traumatic brain injury, automic nervous system function, sleep, and the psychology pf close relationships. She also brings strong expertise in clinical data management, program evaluation, and quality improvement.
As the Research Director, Elisabeth leads initiatives to evaluate the effectiveness of ITR in addressing the psychological and physiological effect of emotional trauma. Her work focuses on study design, protocol development, regulatory oversight, and data management. She is passionate about translating complex health data science into clear, actionable insights that support healing and advance evidence-based practice.
Melisa Baker, ITR-CTT, ATR
Trainer and Outreach Coordinator
Melisa Baker is an ITR Certified Trauma Therapist and trainer with ITR Training Institute. She assists students in learning and implementing ITR at all levels. She is a consultant as well as an outreach coordinator to help prospective students and corporate clinical partners find the right courses for their needs and goals. She brings years of clinical expertise, warmth, clarity, and a commitment to making ITR and effective trauma recovery more accessible worldwide.
Kari Mitchell
Executive Assistant
Kari co-owned and operated her father's ad tracking business for many years and worked with many top publishers and ad agencies. Patterson Advertising Reports (PAR) gave Kari massive experience with not only customer experience, but organization and data management. Marketing and administration systems are also areas Kari excels in.
ITR's Team in Action
We LOVE Our Team!
Our team is second to none with skilled professionals that serve from the heart. We are all on the same mission: to bring ITR to the world and heal trauma! Our team ranges from ITR-Certified Trauma Specialists, ITR-Certified Trauma Recovery Coaches, ITR Instructors, Research Coordinators, Project Managers, Peer Support Architects, Video and Film Professionals and volunteers.
See the Gallery of Our Team PhotosITR Training Institute
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